John McManus - Fox Tooth Heart

“Sweetie, do you wonder what existed before time?”

“No,” said Wendy, as Betsy trembled again with the shock of déjà vu. It wasn’t a seizure this time, but a real memory of asking Austin the same question. How could nothing exist? How was forever possible? He had merely shrugged, but Claudia said, “Earth is a billion times bigger than Tennessee. The solar system’s a billion times bigger again. The galaxy’s a billion times bigger again, and the universe? It grew out of a single grain of sand.”

As if in awe at such enormity, Claudia gazed into the dark. The Satanists were silent. Maybe their minds were boggling like Betsy’s, sagging like slack ropes.

“Do you want to know how?”

“Yes,” said Betsy, as her song came to an end.

“Because God wanted it this way.”

“But what came before God?”

“What do you mean?”

“How did it all start?”

“That’s why we pray,” said Claudia, and Betsy’s mind quit boggling, because Claudia was no more curious than the Satanists.

She was paging through her Bible again. That fire was God’s blessing, Betsy recalled the milkman saying. Claudia’s reason wasn’t a reason. Betsy imagined Jimmy in church thanking the Lord. “I’m grateful for my life,” Jimmy had told the Lord, when his life was Betsy. An infinite universe, while she’d spent years in a trailer, seeing none of it. Now the Satanists were listening to this drivel without any argument. Had Claudia worn them down? Betsy saw them in happy worship together, the Satanists and Quillens, singing hymns. Only she shivered alone in the dark outside the Kingdom Hall. The tables had turned against her, unbearably against her, it seemed, until Wendy drew the revolver.

A sweet thrill brimmed inside Betsy. It wasn’t because she wanted to cause harm. For Claudia Quillen to live a thousand years would have been fine with Betsy. The gun meant she wasn’t alone. Like Betsy, Wendy was balking at a doctrine that called their misery God’s desire. To the two of them, nothing was a blessing. As if to confirm it, Wendy glanced at her. For a moment, even after Wendy pulled the trigger and shot Claudia in the heart, Betsy thought she was learning that she and Wendy loved each other.

Blood poured out of Claudia, soaking her shirt. Betsy saw it in the periphery as she held Wendy’s gaze. She heard Olivia scream and Daniel moan. The van coasted to a halt. Through the whole spate of violence — Zacky seizing the gun and shooting Daniel, then drawing it on Olivia, finally forcing the cocked weapon into Helen’s hands and commanding, “Your turn”—neither Wendy nor Betsy blinked.

The shot blasted the girl halfway out of her seat. “Now give it to Betsy,” Zacky said, as the boy choked.

“No,” Austin said, blocking her from Helen’s reach.

“We’ve all got to, to make it equal.”

“She done killed her dog,” said Austin, who must have thought he was saving her life. Betsy didn’t want her life saved. What she wanted was Wendy’s love. She hadn’t understood that until now. If it meant worshiping Satan, so be it. “Give it,” she said, taking the gun from Helen. Aiming it at the Quillen boy, she looked at Wendy again. I love you, she thought, before realizing her error.

The mistake wasn’t to love, but to admit to the love in her mind. She’d chased Floyd off that way, and Turnip too. Even her ma. She was repulsive to them all, and sure enough, even Wendy blinked and turned away.

Austin squeezed Betsy’s thigh. They were coming to a truss bridge. He only liked her because she didn’t want him — and why not, now that she knew she was stupid too? She couldn’t remember an hour ago. For all she knew, they could be crossing back into Pike County again. Driving to Florida with a truck of milk. How often did she think? Of course Jimmy hadn’t written that song. She pictured his smirks after he came, as if he wished she would shrivel to nothing. Déjà vu was when she lived out the things that had happened to her ma. Before long she would get pregnant, turn mean, go to bed, and a neighbor would commit her to the state hospital.

High above a river, Austin said, “Let me,” offering his life for hers, which struck Betsy as his dumbest move yet.

There was a hiss as the cassette switched sides. “Oh, my darling, oh, my darling,” sang the children as Claudia let out a few last sputters. That’s just agonal breaths, Betsy thought. It began to dawn on her what they had done. She wasn’t fully a part of it yet, nor was Austin, who stared with dumb, adoring eyes. Hope dwindling, she watched for a similar sign from Wendy. None came. Figuring she had one last chance for it, she fired, which jerked her with enough force that the Quillen boy took his bullet off-center and lived through to the trial that would rivet both Kentucky and Tennessee the next spring.

For years after the journalists gave up, the chaplain at the Tennessee Prison for Women kept probing: Do you hate Austin for what he testified? Will he never come visit you? Do you still love him? Did you kill for love? Why’d you think killing would make somebody love you? And how did it feel when Jimmy sent your ma away? It must have burned you up. You must have dreamed of murder, even way back then.

The reporters had hoped she would reply, “Yes,” whereas the chaplain wanted, “I was just a kid, and Jimmy ruined me,” so he could go, “Christ forgives!” She said nothing. The other Satanists had blurted whatever they could think of, but Betsy talked only in her head. To both Satan and Jehovah, she prayed for mental illness to set in. When it didn’t, she began to research other faiths’ devils and gods. The books she read led her to studies further and further afield. After a few years, she had given herself the equivalent of a high school education. Still, she never could seem to pray right. She would stroke the place between her eyes that some religions called the third eye, petting it with a finger, begging for a spirit to push through. None did. For her ma never to have taken her to church, not once, came to seem like child abuse. Even Floyd, a Methodist, had attended service alone. She discussed that with no one, but she touched herself often, until one bright day in the courtyard when the chaplain said, “What’s with your head?”

“I’m trying to go crazy like my ma.”

“By rubbing your head?”

“Spirits enter through your third eye.”

The chaplain touched Betsy’s forehead. “I see what’s wrong.”

“What?” said Betsy.

“There’s a hymen over your third eye.”

“Oh, can you fix it?”

Frowning, he flicked that spot with a finger. “One way to find out,” he said, and jabbed Betsy so hard there that she fell over backward.

Before she could take in enough air to yell for help, he was on top of her. “Witch! Devil!” he cried out, hammering into her third eye with five joined fingers until a guard came and said she’d had enough.

The two men walked away. Pain radiated through Betsy. “All right?” asked an inmate. Lying there on the lawn, she shook her head. Something was happening. It was as though spirits were pouring in, guiding her toward a vision of the future. She could see a van crossing a river. Bloody Jimmy with his bunny. The house fire, the soap operas. A vet’s office. A swing. It overwhelmed her like the sunlight, until she understood: in prison the future was just memories. She barely had any. All her life she’d been forgetting so much. Look how little she recalled of Jimmy’s years. In her mind they hardly comprised a week. A gnaw of dread; a few verses of a song. What a fool she’d been, praying for oblivion when it was already hers. The future was the past in mirror image, nothing else to it. You’ve always been providing, she thought, rolling over onto her belly to shade her eyes.